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SKOS and Linked Data

SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems) is a vocabulary to express data on knowledge organization systems in RDF. SKOS is meant to be as easy of use as possible, fitting existing practices while keeping general enough to fit a high number of use cases and KOS configurations. In this talk a short introduction to SKOS was given. A specific emphasis was put on how SKOS allows connecting knowledge organization systems together, a key feature for scenarios that aim at leveraging existing vocabularies on the web of data and making them truly linked resources. SKOS can thus be seen as one of the crucial pieces of technology to build a conceptual layer for the linked data cloud--connecting concepts as a "glue" complementary to the identification of "real-world entities" which is one of the current foci of the linked data initiative. This talk presented how this vision is being adopted in a number of projects, in the Cultural Heritage sector and beyond. The speaker also gave an idea of the main challenges that should be tackled, based on the work of the W3C Library Linked Data incubator group. Among these, two crucial issues are the identification of links between KOSs different organizations and the connection of these KOS to descriptions of objects from different contexts.